[wilsonng]

Maybe you should try using the weekly review (either in AutoFocus or GTD).

The weekly review is part of the GTD system that allows you to trust that you are on top of your task list. You will trust your system and know that you will not be missing anything if you would do the weekly review.

The weekly review is used to look at what you have on your task list, prune here and there (either delete it if it's not important or delegate to someone with better resources for the job) or re-evaluate goals and objectives.

I use the weekly review to look at my Someday/Maybe list and see which projects/tasks I want to make active. I also look at the currently active tasks/projects and determine whether I should delete it (the work put into it isn't worth the effort or there is minimal gain), delegate it to someone else (take it off my list of to-do's), or send it back into Someday/Maybe (I've spent enough time on something and just want to put it on the backburner for a while because something else on my Someday/Maybe became a higher priority).

Everybody loves the capturing part. But if you don't do some pruning, your task list will just get bigger and bigger, uglier, and messier.

Use the weekly review to evaluate the tasks/projects and determine whether they fit into your personal goals and objectives. A project that sounded interesting a week ago or a year ago may no longer be as interesting and should be deleted or delegated. Or maybe your goals have changed (I'm not really as interested in my skateboarding project so I might want to start deleting the projects that are connected to skateboarding).

I imagine my task list like my backyard. To keep it nice and orderly, I gotta cut the cut grass, prune around some plants, and move flower pots around to keep things manageable.

Buying plants, flowers, and trees is exciting (kinda like the capturing phase). But If you let it grow wild, it'll soon become a mess. You gotta start looking at your backyard (the weekly review phase) and start taking out the dead trees or plants, or move them around.

Otherwise you'll just have a huge jungle that is similar to a messy task list.